Arne Duncan, Raj Chetty, Eric Hanushek, John King, Kevin Huffman, John White, and Michael Johnston, and the other evaluation hawks did not think about this teacher when they said full steam ahead on evaluating teachers by student scores:
Beth writes:
“As Diane points out, teachers are already, and always have been, evaluated. Here is the problem: I am a special education teacher in an alternative high school. I teach students with severe psychological and behavioral disorders. These students are not exempt, and must take all the same state tests (including Regents) that other students take. My evaluation is based upon what percentage of my students improve their test scores by an amount estimated at the beginning of the year. Because I teach what are called 8-1-1 classes (8 students, 1 teacher, 1 teacher’s aide), my evaluation will be based upon, at most, 16 students. However, at this point in the year, it looks like only 6 of the students I began the year with will still be in our school at the end. This isn’t unusual–students move, get put in residential facilities, drop out, or become chronically truant at a high rate in my school. Of the 6 students left, one has become pregnant and has gone off her meds. Most days she can’t even make it into class because of her emotional breakdowns. One student has been hospitalized for months, not receiving instruction from me. One comes to school about once a week. Two swear at me whenever I try to get them to do work, and tell me they don’t care, they’re dropping out as soon as they’re 16. Their parents tell me they can’t help, they can’t make their sons do anything, either. One is facing incarceration, and may not be here at the end of the year. If 4 of these 6 don’t reach their goals on the end of the year test, that will “prove” I’m a bad teacher.
“I wanted to work with students who really needed me, to help students who are struggling the most. But because I work with students who are impoverished, disabled, homeless, incarcerated, and mentally unstable, I may very well be labeled as “ineffective.” Does this really mean I’m a bad teacher?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No evaluation hawk thought at all. They just drank the money laced cc$$ Koolaid. There are thousands of teachers who will be deemed ‘bad’ because not one person involved in the development of any of this crap was a true public educator.
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You already know the answer to that is “no.” However, it doesn’t mean that your principal and or superintendent will understand this. What does the Special Ed supervisor say? Test scores are not supposed to be counted this year in NY are they? I thought I heard Cuomo say that. At any rate, there aren’t many who would do what you do everyday. We know you’re doing a good job. Hopefully someone else will get a clue.
Anne, Governor 1% said that the test scores won’t count for the kids.
As of this moment, however, they will still count for the teacher’s evaluations.
So if I opt out, teachers in Ohio take a “zero” (I asked some last night) and then are presumably publicly humiliated or suffer economic sanctions or something, and I don’t want any part of that crazy, so I’m torn.
I recognize that they have deliberately set this up as an elaborate Jenga puzzle centered on the test, but I don’t quite know how to get out of it without collateral damage
The thing is, an intelligent person looks at this situation, weighs their options, and then makes a career decision. Game theory. Way it is.
I teach ESL and work with a not-too-dissimilar population. I have the luxury of having a partner who earns considerably more than I do. If I were to lose my job, it would be an inconvenience, not a disaster. Because of this, I can afford to remain where I like to be — teaching low level ESL students. We have long since passed the point where I would be personally devastated by a low evaluation score that resulted from VAM — I know it’s junk science and would be no more devastated by a low VAM score than I would be devastated by a low dice roll if dice rolls were to be incorporated into my evaluation.
I’m not worried about money, and I no longer respect the instrument used to evaluate my performance (I received a “4”, the highest mark possible, last year — but we haven’t started using VAM yet). So, at least personally, I’m good.
Good for you! At least in Massachusetts, there’s another catch-22 with respect to English language learners — the English language learner subgroup is supposed to grow at a certain rate, but when students become fluent in English they are removed from the group, as new immigrants who don’t speak English join the group. It is absolutely clear that nobody really thought about any of this in terms of how it would actually work in reality.
HA! Wordsmith, you are describing a phenomenon I brought to my old principal’s attention years ago under NCLB! It was comically impossible for schools to meet NCLB’s mandate of constant growth with ESL students because of what you describe. I have explained this many times to many people. They are the only student category that exits its own specifically because they HAVE gained in ability (and as you say, they are constantly adding to the bottom level of ability).
Imagine if we took, say, the Hispanic students, and removed them from the “Hispanic” group once their level of proficiency rose above a certain level (maybe adding them to the “White” group). Now imagine if we berated their teachers because the numbers revealed that the numbers for the “Hispanic” group never rose above a certain level. Now imagine that we did all of this with a straight face! That’s essentially what we did (and in some cases apparently are still doing) with ESL students and their teachers. It’s comedy gold.
As I said, I used to worry more about this stuff before I came to the realization that the money isn’t that big a deal to me, and that the poor systemic results are less of a reflection of my teaching and professional ability than they are a reflection of the fact that a lot of the people calling the shots are either conniving crooks, slack-jawed morons, or both. ANYONE with a basic grasp of logic could have seen the obvious problem with measuring growth in the ESL category the same way that the other categories of students were/are measured, under NCLB and beyond.
If and when the devils, circus clowns, and idiots making policy remove me from my job because of VAM as applied to ESL student growth, I will not feel one shred of shame over it. And I’ll be fully prepared to take the matter to court, if need be.
Shame is something one might feel if they are found wanting by an evaluation system that they actually respect and see as valid. I am not seeing that here.
“poor systemic results are less of a reflection of my teaching and professional ability than they are a reflection of the fact that a lot of the people calling the shots are either conniving crooks, slack-jawed morons, or both”
Modern education in a nutshell.
werebat73: point well made. An inherently fatal flaw in VAM as it is actually designed, constructed, and used.
In other words, the better you do your job—the more you get punished.
No wonder that when teachers ask questions of the educrats imposing and describing VAManiacal schemes, we can read comments like:
“The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.” [Mark Twain]
😎
This raises, once again, a question that I as a Spanish teacher have been asking since high stakes testing reared its ugly little head: How are Duncan and Co. going to evaluate those of us who teach content areas for which CC doesn’t mandate a standardized test? There is no standardized test in music; how will music teachers be evaluated? There is no standardized test in PE; how will PE teachers be evaluated? There is no standardized test in history; how will history teachers be evaluated? And how will world language teachers such as myself be evaluated?
I’ve heard horror stories; for example, a special ed teacher in New Mexico who will be evaluated based on the test performance of students she doesn’t even teach. Is this the sort of thing that I as a Spanish teacher can expect as this testing frenzy creeps further and further into our schools and our lives? Or will these content areas simply be eliminated from the curriculum?
I have already been relegated to second-class citizen status so that students can have more seat time in math and language arts. My class schedule has been severely cut back and I was told recently that next year I will only be 0.4 FTE, not even enough to qualify for benefits. I teach a language that is spoken on a daily basis by tens of millions of Americans, yet the powers that be don’t seem to value what I bring to the table. In fact, my single greatest accomplishment as a teacher (in the last two years, about 75% of the 8th graders who took my class finished the year with a high school credit in Spanish) has gone completely unrecognized by my administrators–it didn’t even get mentioned in my most recent administrator evaluation.
In a recent conversation with my principal I told her that I can teach some CC content (math and science) as part of my Spanish curriculum; I actually have the lesson plans ready to go. She told me that, because I am not endorsed in those content areas, what I taught would not “count.” Yet, as I have been looking at job postings for Spanish teachers in my district, I am finding that it is now expected that world language teachers must be able to explain how they will incorporate CC into their curriculum.
I am only a few years out from retirement, so I am somewhat optimistic that I can ride out this CC nightmare, but I fear for all those young art teachers, music teachers, history teachers, world language teachers, and PE teachers entering the profession with hearts full of hope and heads full of idealism. What will happen to them?
I’m sure Pearson et al are already working hard on the “solution” to the problem of how to evaluate teachers who teach subjects that aren’t featured in the current high stakes standardized tests. Can you guess what it might be?
Early “retirement?”
Ah, yes: The Final Solution to the Teacher Question.
States: “We’d like to evaluate ALL of our teachers with this VAM, because it’s the bee’s knees (or at least that’s what the guys with the money all say). But so many of them are teaching subjects that the kids don’t have to take high stakes standardized tests in, because those tests just don’t exist!”
Pearson, etc. (salivating): “We can help you with that!”
The problem with that is, some of us don’t have partners to support us… we have ourselves. We love our kids, we love the sense of social justice that teaching in a low income area creates, we love our subject, and we would be less effective in another.
I teach French and English in high school. I am also certified as a Generalist 4-8, but honestly I have more to offer in my current subject areas due to my Masters in both. Where does this leave my students, my school and me? I should leave a job where I am highly effective, because I am “charged” with being less effective due to teaching ESL’s and low income? What a travesty.
I did not get into teaching to make money nor to be chased out by a 5 week trained newbie who has an “elite” education ( which, btw, I also have…). I am not leaving. I am not giving up.
Then you make your choice. Eventually, if we continue down this path, you lose your job (and hopefully you don’t feel too bad about it, because the loss wasn’t really due to any personal deficiency of your own but rather the intellectual and quite possibly ethical deficiencies of those in charge). Lather, rinse, and repeat enough, and the system doesn’t attract anyone who has other options. Ironically, once that happens, the only people left who are willing to teach are those who really have no other professional options.
Well, those people, and crazy people like me who stick around. There will probably always be at least SOME of us.
I am surprised that you have not yet encountered the “Student Learning Objective” SLO or “Student Growth Objective”SGO template for judging teachers of “non-tested subjects.” This is a version of mangagement-by-objectives on steroids pushed by USDE in many publications and powerpoints, starting with states that received RttT grants and promoted elsewhere through the Reform Support Network.
Look at this an example for evaluating art teachers in Denver last year. The Denver SLO/SGO template is used in many states for teachers who have job asignments for which there are not statewide tests. Denver Public Schools. (2013). Welcome to student growth objectives: New rubrics with ratings. http://sgoinfo.dpsk12.org/
Whenever I read about these SLO/SGO’s John Merrow’s video of Michelle Rhee sitting with principals and berating them about how much they are going to raise scores comes to mind.
If teachers had crystal balls to predict the future so accurately, we’d all be in the stock market.
SLOs, at least as written in my district, are trivially easy for a teacher to hand him or herself a high mark on. Seriously. I got a 4 out of 4 on my SLOs last year, and experimented a bit this year (I *might* get a 3 out of 4 on one of them this year). Next year I’ll probably fall back to the plan I usually use, which is all but guaranteed to give me a 4 out of 4.
The trick is to think like a conniving, number-twisting ed deformer. Once you can do that, you can get the numbers you select to say whatever you want them to say.
How to succeed at SLOs as an English teacher:
1. Choose a type of essay you want to use as the subject of your SLO (persuasive, informative, whatever — it doesn’t really matter much).
2.On DAY ONE of your course, right after you take attendance, pass out a prompt for this type of essay. Make sure to tell the kids (who have just come back from summer vacation) that this activity is just to set a baseline, and WILL NOT AFFECT THEIR GRADES IN ANY WAY. Other than pointing out this fact, appear to forget that you even passed these prompts out as much as you can without allowing the students to completely blow off responding to them. Don’t give them ANY help. Remember, you are establishing a baseline!
3. Collect the essays, which will probably be pretty poorly written as the kids just came back from summer break and you just told them that they don’t count for a grade.
4. Grade the essays using whatever rubric your district provides (or better yet, demands that you use). Don’t feel too bad about being a harsh grader, as low marks will help you and won’t hurt your students. In fact, you don’t even need to hand the papers back to the students (you are “holding on to them to prove your baseline” or some such).
5. Over the next week or two, actually teach whatever essay form you are using for your SLOs. The culmination of this lesson will be the creation of an essay of the type you are using for your SLO. Give the students model essays that match your rubric, heavy scaffolding, and anything else you can think of that will help them. Consider how much attention your evaluator is actually paying to all of this — chances are that they themselves are so overworked that they will not even notice if you hand the students a “scaffold” that basically writes half of the essay for them. Make sure that the students understand that THIS essay IS for a grade!
6. Grade the new essays. It’s OK to be a bit generous this time. Use the same rubric that you used before (again, it’s best if your district is so top-down that it insists that you use rubrics that it designed — it won’t be able to argue that its own rubrics are not up to the task of being used for SLOs).
7. Now record your data. Graph paper works well. For each student name, record their score on each section of the rubric for the first essay, and then (next to that) record their score for the second essay.
8. Next to these two data sets, write down how many of the rubric categories improved for each student, from the first essay to the second.
9. You should have all of this data maybe three weeks into the school year, before you’ve even written your SLOs. Write down how many of your students showed “growth” in all five (or whatever number) categories of the rubric. Then how many showed “growth” in four out of five, etc.
10, Write your SLO accordingly. If you have a total of 50 students in two classes, and five of them improved on all five categories of the rubric, 10 improved on four out of five, thirty improved on three out of five, and five improved on two out of five, assert (for example) that all students will improve on at least one category of the rubric, 50% will improve on at least two categories, 25% will improve on at least three categories, and 10% will improve on at least four out of five. Note that you would have already exceeded your goals in this case. No need to show your evaluator your actual data before they sign off on your SLO goal.
Depending on how math-savvy your evaluator is, you can get some mileage out of playing games with the term “percentage”. For example, if four out of twenty students meet my target at the start of the year, and eight out of twenty meet my target two weeks in (before I even write my SLO), then I can honestly say that there will be a “100% increase” in the number of students who can meet my target (and know that this goal has already been achieved). Remember that most evaluators weren’t really math majors. If you are an English major, remember that you can always feign complete ignorance about things like percentages. Sure, what you wrote looks weaselly when scrutinized, but you’re just an English major — you barely comprehend all of this math stuff!
Anyway. I got very high marks on my SLOs last year, and will get them again this year as well. And the year after that.
SLOs are kind of a joke.
The most precious commodity a teacher has is time. At high school, a teacher has 150 or more teenagers with whom to interact every day. Having to waste time on a futile quest to predict how much “growth” students will achieve is an infuriating exercise. It adds nothing to a teacher’s practice. It is of no benefit to students. It steals time from things that do matter.
I cannot predict which student’s father will be deported; I cannot predict which student’s mother will lose her job; I cannot predict which student’s boyfriend will lose his life to a bullet; I cannot predict which student’s little brother will develop a brain tumor; I cannot predict which student’s schizophrenia will become acute because her family loses its health coverage. I can predict that all this – and more – happens to students in a school year.
Gaming SLO/SGO’s may be a necessity to keep one’s job, but doing so lends legitimacy to the very construct. I know I have the luxury of critiquing from the safety of retirement, but even when I was an active teacher I would not have quietly acquiesced to this nonsense. If we don’t call this out for the uselessness it is, who will?
Christine,
The fact that SLOs can be so gamed is kind of my point. I scored a 4 out of 4 on my evaluation last year, but what did it prove? Mostly that I’m clever when it comes to gaming the evaluation system that has been set up.
As for wasted time, you are correct — but on reflection I have realized that our old evaluation/recertification system included a mandate to take continuing education courses that were mostly useless when it came to becoming better teachers. These courses used to cost money out of out own pockets, and may well have taken up more time per year (on average) than SLOs and the rest of the new evaluation system that RI’s commissioner of education cribbed from her corporate reform patrons and cronies.
In the end it is the taxpayers that are going to have to ask if the benefits of this new system are worth the expenses. My building alone has gone from three administrators to seven, almost entirely due to the new evaluation system. Last year only half of one percent of RI teachers were found to be “ineffective”.
It may be that the taxpayers really are dumb enough that they think the obvious expense involved is worth it. You know what I realized, though? It’s less money out of my pocket, and in the end it’s even less time out of my day. Why should I go out of my way to protect them from their own bovine ignorance?
If you think that’s a crummy attitude for a teacher to have, remember that it’s exactly the sort of attitude that this new evaluation system encourages.
I speak as someone who has spent many, many hours reading this blog and elsewhere, learning exactly what has been going on in education from the local to the national level. I had worked out for myself that a cadre of very wealthy people were at least manipulating education policy a year or two before I even knew who Diane Ravitch WAS. I’ve been explaining this to people for YEARS now; some few listen, but most continue to chew their cud and softly low about how I can’t be right — I just *CAN’T* be. Well, OK. Maybe I’m tired of trying to protect my fellows from the dangers of a system that I, personally, am pretty well equipped to navigate.
The only thing I really fear in all of this, as a teacher, is VAM being applied to me as an ESL teacher. And in a way that might not even be so bad, because the system may be so obviously flawed at that level that when push comes to shove — when jobs are on the line — the local power brokers may prove willing to back off when threatened with even individual resistance.
As time passes, I realize that I’m much more angry about all of this when I’m wearing my PARENT hat. When I see the obvious narrowing of curriculum that my CHILDREN have to deal with. My co-workers I will eventually give up on, but my kids? NEVER.
Of course my kids, like me, tend to score very well on standardized tests. My second oldest out of four recently received his first NECAP test results — two 4 grades, the highest attainable. So the test itself isn’t an issue for me — but the junk all around it is. The narrowed curriculum (my oldest had to take two English and two Math courses not long ago, and I went ballistic when administration displayed a cattle-like inability to comprehend how this stripped my son of two OTHER classes he might have otherwise enjoyed. That son scored a 3 and a 4 on the NECAP and didn’t need to double down on ELA and Math, but it was “school policy”, and the way the system is currently set up a parent practically had to get an audience with Barack Obama himself in order to address local issues because every official gets to shrug and point upwards because the decision isn’t THEIRS to make…
I worked in a district in Colorado that everyone is seeking to emulate because of its “reforms” and performance-based teacher evaluations and compensation. I taught Spanish as well. The biggest wedge in our evaluation “pie”? How well students did on standardized Spanish assessments developed for the district by outside consultants, and the STAMP test (given to 1st year students, best suited for 3rd and up). Coming soon to a district near you… Arne Duncan LOVED our former supt, and he moved on to a much higher salary with Dallas ISD, leaving those terrible reforms unchanged in his wake.
Bob – I am also a 7-12 Spanish teacher in NYS. 20% of my evaluation is based on my school-wide score. In my small, rural, P-12 school, the school-wide score is based on the grades 3-8 performance on the ELA and math tests. So, yes, 1/5 of my evaluation is the performance of students who (mostly) have never entered foot in my classroom on a test of content that I do not teach!
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Beth –
You are certainly my idea of a bad(ass) teacher! Your students are lucky to have you, whether or not they can recognize that at the moment.
Arne, Bills, Raj and the rest of that cabal will never recognize your talents and ability because for them, this is just a thought experiment, not real life.
I’ve been musing on what would happen if Bills and Melinda met with an unfortunate accident, perhaps at the hands of a high school student in psychosis? Without their $$$ would this all just go away?
I agree! Her evaluations should probably read higher than mine! Lol
I want to see the objective and quantified observation instrument that can fairly and effectively quantify all of the variables in a school or classroom. PEOPLE ARE NOT NUMBERS!!
“Or will these content areas simply be eliminated from the curriculum? ”
Given that next to no time is devoted to teaching science or social studies in my child’s elementary school anymore, I would say that question has already been answered. Math and LA are important, but not at the expense of everything else. It is probably the worst aspect of high-stakes testing for me. The school has around 90% abdicated responsibility for a child’s social studies and science education to the parents and many parents don’t even fully realize it. I am basically teaching my child all the things he/she should be learning in school but isn’t because of high stakes testing.
Perfect job for Teach for America! The Best & Brightest with spunk, vigor, grit, ready to cure the world of it’s ills…they have what it takes to raise test scores and impact lives. #sarcasm & #OUTRAGE
Beth, SWD need trained and experienced teachers. Something the corporate money grabbers must ignore because it does not fit into their AmericanGreed scenario.
Our society is already paying a HUGE price.
As I am writing this, a high school stabbing in Pittsburgh is flashing on CNN. Crisis and killing du jour!
I am sure we will hear about the heroics of teachers related to this incident. Celebration of our ability to step in front of bullets, knives, drape kids during tornadoes and assure the mentally ill that, “Baby, everything will be alright!”.
Tomorrow, back to VAM & firing the Truly Best & Brightest Real Teachers!
Thanks to Bill, Arne, Barack & Co.
It is unfortunate that there are so few vocational programs for this population. Have the students learn a trade and have more career oriented curriculum instead of expecting the impossible. Years ago when I first began teaching the self contained population in an elementary school, we had a state of the art industrial arts room. The students were so proud of their accomplishments…woodworking, electrical projects, ceramic, tiling, jewelry makings etc. Today that state of the art industrial arts room is a classroom and this same population is struggling in the mainstream or in self contained classrooms.
Yep, skills. Unfortunately, the money is squandered on teaching the skill of answering convoluted questions.
Maybe in the future, America will have a trick question call center, and to balance the trade deficit, the Chinese will phone in little conundrums, and pay CCSS educated Americans to answer them?
I’m not seeing a marketable demand for CCSS skills. Why not teach to clarity and simplicity as core values?
In my book, you are not a bad or incompetent teacher. You are dedicated and hard working.
During the thirty years that I taught, I had students just like those you describe in my classes every year—-every day!
However, according to the methods created by the out-of-touch (hopefully, because anything else is more frighting—I’d rather have them stupid and ignorant instead of knowing exactly what they are doing like the Nazis knew what they were doing when Hitler started to build the concentrate camps where millions were tortured and killed) fake ed reformers have created to judge you, you will probably be found guilty and might lose your job to be replaced by what, a concentration camp for the kids you worked with? And to silence you if you speak up in the defense of those kids, will they throw you in the same cell block with a box to next to your name to check off when you are herded into a gas chamber alongside those same kids?
Nah, Beth, you’re not a bad teacher. Obviously you are “ineffective”, a failure!
Drip, Drip, Drip!
Sorry, my sarcsmometer has a leak.
Bet, wear it as a badge of honor that symbolizes the hard task that you took on with passion and dedication: congratulations, you are “ineffective” teacher of the year lol!
To the corporatist deformers, those kids are expendable.
Beth, I believe you know this already, but your true measure as a teacher is how you are seen by your students.
Do they trust you? Do they feel you are there for them? Do your students feel safe while in class, without fear of judgement or humiliation? Are they learning (and forget what the David Colemans of the world define as learning)?
You and the readers of this blog know the answer to those questions is “yes,” so, hard though it may, try to disregard the arrogant know-nothings who would force you to think otherwise.
The metrics by which these opportunists would try to hold power over you are a lie; the kids are the Truth.
great letter
You have to love the math and the formula for evaluation. 40% on scores that can be easily manipulated (Test Tampering in NYC – http://protectportelos.org/is-test-tampering-rampant-in-nyc-too/) and 60% on Observations.
By the way, the NY Supreme Court decreed that Teacher Observations “contain no facts” See Elentuck v Green 1994 (MATTER OF ELENTUCK v. GREEN http://www.leagle.com/decision/1994627202AD2d425_1270)
Beth-
If it’s any consolation, the youngsters that I teach in elementary drink, do drugs, have sex, drop F bombs in the halls, leave class whenever, have aggressive behaviors…you name it. I’m not leaving kinders out of this mix either. Half of them won’t get to high school. It wasn’t this bad until NCLB began and only got worse at the present.
We have the statistics to tell us that if children can’t read past 3rd grade that they won’t be successful. So the logic of reformers is to make it more rigorous. What geniuses! Now we have kids who are rebelling because it is not only you who are feeling like a bad teacher but these kids are thinking worst of themselves. They are telling us that they cannot conform to more rigorous standards, so they are doing what kids do–act it out. But the problem is nobody is listening. So we are left to feel like guilty parents do when their child has tantrums.
Reblogged this on rightfulwriter and commented:
This is real. Teachers are being measured by their students. What kind of value does that place on teaching the “right kind” of kids? It’s easy to see how does this system forces students into the category of “undesirable” and therefore disenfranchising them.
The fact that she cares about them makes her a good teacher.
Beth,
You are not a bad teacher; you work for a bad system and you live in a bad country with bad politicians and bad plutocrats who want to take this bad country and make it even worse . . . . . .
(Okay, not all of the USA is bad, but our current culture centering around the middle and working class is deplorable . . . )
Reblogged this on Stuck on Social Work and commented:
As a mental health case manager, this confirms my fear, that special education teachers who work in difficult settings will become discouraged by their teacher evaluations. Special education teachers in these settings are heros. They don’t have a door to shut or a car to drive away in like I do. Let’s encourage our special education teachers to stay strong and support them any way we can.
As a mental health case manager, this confirms my fear, that special education teachers who work in difficult settings will become discouraged by their teacher evaluations. Special education teachers in these settings are heros. They don’t have a door to shut or a car to drive away in like I do. Let’s encourage our special education teachers to stay strong and support them any way we can.